There are two types of fitness business marketing strategies. One is “image” marketing and the other is “direct response” marketing. Image based marketing is meant to remind consumers of your brand and the services you offer. I’m sure you’ve seen Nike or Pepsi commercials. That’s image marketing. 95% of all advertising you see on television and in print is image based marketing.
Direct response marketing is meant to evoke an immediate response and compel the consumer to take action. If you have ever seen an infomercial such for Tae Bo or for one of the no money down real estate guys, you’ve seen a direct response advertisement.
As a fitness professional you should never use the “image” advertising or what I consider ineffective fitness business marketing. Image ads are effective at building a brand but to do that your target market must see your ad 12 to 15 times or more. How many times would you have to run your ad for your target market to be able to see it that many times – 100, 200, 300 times?
Most fitness professionals aren’t big enough to afford that kind of advertising budget. It’s just not feasible. Besides, as a small business person you need to have a quick response to your ads so that you can receive a quick return on your investment.
What Makes Something A Direct Response Fitness Business Marketing Piece?
Direct response ads have several distinguishable characteristics that make them unique compared to image ads. First, they’re trackable. That is, when someone contacts you for information or to become a client, you are able to determine exactly which ad in which media they responded to.
Second, they’re measurable. Since you know which ads or marketing pieces are being responded to and how many contacts you receive from each one, you can measure which are the most effective and which ads need to be changed or dropped.
Third, direct response ads are accountable. Your ads are very similar to employees. In fact, fitness advertising can really be considered “salesmanship in print”. It’s like having a fitness sales person that is accountable to you for what they do and how they produce.
If an ad or creative marketing campaign isn’t producing, you want to know so you can make intelligent decisions as to whether to continue running it as is, make changes to it, or discontinue it all altogether.
A fourth characteristic of a marketing ad is that they give you immediate feedback. Because your ads have a built-in response mechanism you can determine very quickly how effective they are. Image ads, on the other hand, don’t allow for this valuable information and most often you’ll never know whether or not an inquiry or purchase was made as a result of someone seeing your ad or fitness business marketing material. About the only way you can determine this is by asking each prospect or client who buys how they heard about you.
Some additional distinctive characteristics of direct response ads and effective fitness business marketing pieces are they:
• Use attention getting headlines
• Tell the prospect what’s in it for them
• Make an irresistible offer
• Provide a simple method of taking advantage of the offer
• Place a time or quantity limit on the offer
• Use tracking codes to determine the response rate of the ad
The Two Biggest Problems With Most Marketing Pieces
If you’re like most fitness professionals, you’re either doing image advertising and fitness business marketing – or you’re not marketing at all.
Once again, one of the biggest problems with image ads (aside from their inability to provide you with instantaneous results or feedback) is for them to work effectively they must be run a number of times, and can end up costing you a enormous amount of money.
A second major problem with image ads is that in most cases they give the reader absolutely no reason, benefit or advantage to contact the person that ran the ad to either gain more information or to do business with them.
All you need to do is open the Yellow Pages to the fitness or health club section and look at the ads. Most of them are carbon copies of each other and the most profound thing you can say about any of them is “well at least I know they have a certification” if it’s a fitness pros’ ad or “ they have free weights and treadmills” if it’s a club. Not very compelling.
If you want your fitness business to stand out and get more than your fair share of calls – calls from interested and qualified prospects you’ve got to make your ads very clearly scream to the readers that you-re different than all the rest – that you’re special – that there’s benefit and advantage to contacting you. And you must do it on a non-threatening basis.
